A few days ago, Patrick McEvoy said that NYCBUG had no topic for their 1 April meeting and asked if he could persuade me to present something, anything. Anything at all.
Anything? ANYTHING? On April Fools’ Day? The day I’m launching my next Kickstarter? The fact that I had absolutely nothing of worth did not dissuade me–indeed, it never has.
I’ll be presenting “What’s Changed Since The Last Time I Came this Way – a talk that was supposed to be about OpenZFS.”
Michael W Lucas and Allan Jude are busy working on a new OpenZFS book, which means not only documenting everything that’s changed in the last 12 years but discovering everything that they got wrong the first time. The quest for accuracy has taken Lucas deep into mailing list archives, Usenet, VAX installation manuals, the Kremlin’s first Internet connection, the United Nations’ effort to merge the BSD projects, and the ULTRIX and S51K filesystems, and left MWL more convinced than ever that filesystems are nothing but a April Fools’ prank. This hurriedly conceived and hastily assembled talk will update you on new OpenZFS features, but will also try to determine if it’s a good prank–or not.
Michael W Lucas’ name may ring a bell for some in the BSD community. He’s written several shelves of books. But for anyone who has seen him speak in public during Ante COVID days, it was clear they are mere transcriptions of his rambling presentations. For this NYC*BUG meeting, he is unlikely to edit out any of his expected corny jokes we endure during his conference presentations.
More likely, you know his name from his grotesque horror fiction. In the same way his technical books are just transcriptions of his presentations, his fictionaal horror is just a simple reflection of someone who lives in a haunted house filled with (pet) rats in Detroit.
18:45 EDT or 22:45 UTC. The talk will be streamed, so you can catch it from anywhere. Instructions are on the NYCBUG web site.